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Thursday, 29 January 2015

Auschwitz revisited

In the week we have been commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz I have been trying to understand why I am so weary and wary of the Holocaust. Despite the undoubted emotional pull of the survivors' testimonies, is there any lasting meaning be found in the ashes at Auschwitz? Should it even be looked for?

I didn't always feel this way.

We recently moved house and a few weeks ago my older son and I were unpacking boxes of books and finding new homes for them. I noticed just how much reading I had done on the subject of the Holocaust, mostly more than twenty years ago.

I had straight histories like 'The War Against the Jews' by Lucy Dawidowicz and 'Holocaust' by Martin Gilbert. I'd read 'Last Waltz in Vienna' by George Clare, Elie Wiesel's 'Night', 'Europa, Europa' by Solomon Perel and Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man', and 'The Drowned and the Saved'. There were Art Spiegelman's graphic novels 'Maus', where Nazis and Jews become cats and mice. Ghetto accounts such as 'A Cup of Tears' by Abraham Lewin and Marek Edelman's 'The Ghetto Fights'. I remembered being completely absorbed by Theo Richmond's detailed account of the destruction of one tiny shtetl village 'Konin'. I had the complete transcript of Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah. Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the 1950s. And of course, Anne Frank's diary, the fully annotated critical edition.

My reading had been a search for meaning - historical, political and theological. I had been trying to make sense of something I knew was shaping my adult Jewish identity.

Last weekend I visited my 88 year old father and asked him to recall for me the visit he made to Auschwitz in the late 1960s while on a business trip to Poland. Perhaps his account could restore my faith in the possibility of finding a purpose in the week's commemorations beyond honouring the memory of the dead.

My father's visit to the death camp took place in a very different world from today. For the first two decades after the war the mood had been for moving on, for forgetting not remembering. The Holocaust was very far from being the defining event of the Second World War it has now become.

While he was on his trip, my father and three work colleagues found themselves with time on their hands when a public holiday was announced to coincide with a Soviet Russian State visit. Their local client, the factory manager of a smelt works in Katowice, suggested they visited Auschwitz, which he explained now ran as a museum.

Although my father was familiar with the name Auschwitz, he told me his knowledge of the how the Nazi's had implemented their killing was vague and sketchy at the time of his visit to Poland. Two of his colleagues had served in the army during the war but their understanding was even less than my father's. So the four British businessmen hired a driver and set off for the day with little or no expectation of what they were about to see.

They reached Auschwitz less than an hour after leaving Katowice and found the camp/museum almost deserted despite the public holiday. In fact, my father and his colleagues seemed to be the only visitors there and were rewarded with a personal tour by one of the senior officials.

They were taken to long wooden huts sectioned off into large glass fronted display cases. Inside the first display were bails of material that my father could not identify. "What is this?" He asked. "Human hair" came the reply, "shaved from the heads of those about to be exterminated." Nothing went to waste, it was explained, "The hair could be weaved into cloth and used for insulation". Next came a display of walking sticks and crutches neatly stacked in huge piles. Then shoes, all sizes, suitcases still with name and home address labels attached, spectacles and false teeth. Apparently, it all had revenue potential for the Third Reich.

After three hours of the tour my father was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the attitude of their guide. "He was more interested in the Nazis' attention to detail, administrative diligence and mechanical ingenuity than in the morality of what had taken place there." Finally, they were taken to see the furnaces that burned day and night, fueled by human corpses.

But what had been new and revelatory to my father nearly fifty years ago has become burdensome and problematic to me. When I look at all the books on my shelves relating to just 12 years out of three thousand years of Jewish history, I have no desire to revisit them or even flick through the pages.

As a student I had thought there were lessons to be learnt and meaning to be divined from what had happened. But now it feels as if the event has been used, abused and politicised, and, from a moral perspective, largely ignored.

As time has passed I have become increasingly pessimistic about our ability to take something meaningful and positive from the horror that is now summed up by the single word 'Auschwitz'.

Some, especially the remaining survivors, see denial and forgetfulness of the Holocaust as the biggest concern we should have. But I think these are the least of our Holocaust problems.

Holocaust denial will remain a fringe issue. The documentation is secure in its veracity and overwhelming in its volume. If anything, today's school children are in danger of thinking that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went to war against Hitler because of what was happening to the Jews.

And we have become very good at remembering. We do it with great care and respect and afford enormous dignity to the survivors and their testimonies. This week's marking of the Russian army's liberation of Auschwitz proved this once again. So, we remember with no difficulty. It's acting on the remembrance that defeats us.

Since the end of the Second World War we have had Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. All of which suggest that despite the creation of so much international law on human rights and genocide, humankind has not progressed an iota as a result of Auschwitz.

I can now see that my own long-term reaction to the Holocaust has led me not to focus on anti-Semitism and Jewish security (although neither can be ignored) but on the values and teaching that I see as central to Judaism. Justice, Compassion, Humility, individual and collective Responsibility. These are not new lessons but very old ones. As a Jew, I choose to apply these to our relationship with the Palestinian people because this is the issue on which we must judge ourselves. In the 21st century this is 'the Jewish question'.

While a growing number of Jews both in Israel and around the world share this perspective, it is still a minority opinion.

When it comes to the Palestinian people, the Holocaust has hardened our hearts and closed our minds. The scale of our own suffering has made us blind to their suffering - which we see as all of their own making.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Why should a people abused and broken become saints? The opposite result is more often the outcome. I am asking for too much. Expecting something that no group is capable of.

And so I have become both weary and wary of trying to take meaning or lessons from the Holocaust. Yes we must continue to teach it as an appalling stain on humanity. And an exercise in empathy is never wasted. But we must not expect it to unlock the human heart.

Maybe all we have are the stories of bureaucratised murder, random survival, and unexpected acts of kindness that Primo Levi called 'Moments of Reprieve'.

My father and his colleagues had planned to eat a meal together that night back at the hotel in Katowice. But after the visit nobody was hungry.

On the return journey my father asked their driver if he had known about the camp during the war. "Oh, yes", he replied. "We knew something was happening. We could smell it." My father asked him whether anyone at the time felt they could do anything about it? The driver replied "Yes, we would wind up the windows tight, so we couldn't smell the stink".

1 comment:

My friend Mark Braverman, author of Fatal Embrace, sent me the following message which I'd sharing as a comment to this post. You can find out more about Mark here http://markbraverman.org/

Robert, thank you, once again for your reflections, which, once again, match my sensibilities and experience so closely. Here is a passage from my book, Fatal Embrace, in which I recount my visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum, ten years ago:

It’s a brilliant exhibition. One walks down, into it. It is subterranean—no windows, no light, no escape. You are led throughcorridors and tunnels, with no control and no way out but through.One traverses the whole, familiar story: from the laws enacted inthe thirties, the walls of isolation, privation, and degradation closingin, to the Final Solution: the ovens, the stacked bodies, the facesof the children. Darkness closes your heart—you feel you will neverescape from this horror, this black hole of evil and despair. !en,turning a corner into the final gallery, on display are the blown-upphotos of the ships bringing the refugees to the shores of Israel,faces shining with hope and gratitude. !ere is David Ben-Gurionreading from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And then,suddenly, you emerge. Ascending a wide flight of stairs, you areoutside, in the light and the open air, standing on a wide patio thatlooks out on the Jerusalem Hills. It’s the final exhibit. And then it hitme. This was no mere museum. This was a lesson; this was indoctrination:from the biblical quote at the entrance, into the depths, andto this sight—The Land. The reward. Our destiny.

The fifty-eight-year spell was broken. I got it. And somethinglet go, and it was okay.

Diane, a fellow delegate, turned to me as we walked outand asked if I had seen the part about how the Nazis acted tomarginalize, dispossess, and banish the Jews, the part before theextermination camps and the ovens. She asked if I had seen thatthis was what we had witnessed over the last few days. Yes, I hadseen. !e spell was broken. I got it. And it was okay.

Treading, as I had so many times, the sacred ground of theHolocaust, I had, for the first time, broken !e Rule: our Holocaust,the Holocaust, must not be compared to any other disaster,genocide, or crime. It has to stand as the ultimate humanitariancrime, the genocide. Not only that, I had also broken a rule sofundamental, so important that it is never even spoken: I hadcompared the Jews to the Nazis. And it was okay. Because, for thefirst time, I knew what I had to do; I knew how to understand andintegrate the Holocaust. For one thing had not changed: the NaziHolocaust would continue to be the formative historical event ofmy life. But now, from this day forward, finding the meaning ofthe Holocaust meant working for justice for Palestine. !ere weretoo many parallels, too many ways in which Israel was doing tothe Palestinians what the Nazis did to us. No, we had not builtdeath camps. But we were turning into beasts, into persecutors,and we were killing a civilization.

Here was the most terrible irony in this scenario: in enshriningour own memory, in living out our liturgy of destruction, to usetheologian Marc Ellis’s phrase, we have been erasing the history ofanother. It is a terrible irony that Yad Vashem, along with Har Herzl,is built on top of these hills west of Jerusalem, hills littered with theremains of Palestinian villages. Some have been turned into parksfor the Jews of Jerusalem. Most are ruins, stones bleaching in thesun, standing guard over uncultivated terraces of olives and grapes,witnesses to shattered lives and a murdered civilization.